Because of my Bum Marketing product, I get lots of emails from people either asking me why their bum marketing efforts are not resulting in profits, or that bum marketing straight out doesn't work.
After getting some additional info from them, I soon see a glaring mistake that they are making. And its this one mistake that really nullifies the effect of any article they write and submit.
You see, bum marketing is not just about writing articles. When done correctly, one article can generate traffic for years. But when done incorrectly, you have have dozens and dozens of articles barely generating any traffic at all.
Successful bum marketers learn about this mistake and change how they write their articles. But most bum marketers give up before ever learning this mistake, and think that bum (and article) marketing just doesn't work.
So what's the mistake? Its not properly choosing the long term keyword phrase to write your articles on.
You can't just pick an affiliate product to promote and start pumping out articles in that niche. If you do, and most people do, you will probably not see the traffic you want because the long tail keyword phrase that you are writing about either:
a. does not have enough daily searches
b. has too many competing websites
Here's the problem with not enough daily searches:
If there is not enough daily searches, the number of people finally getting to that affiliate salespage will be nil.
Let's say that you are targetting a keyword phrase that gets ten searches a day. You write and submit a well written articles around it.
Now, tomorrow, ten people will search for that keyword phrase. And let's say that there was little competition, and you landed on the first page of Google.
Will all ten people who search for that keyword click on the link that goes to your article? Probably not. I generally estimate 50% of searchers will click on the link to the article.
Ok, now there is five people a day reading the article. But will all five click on the link in your resource box? Again, no. The CTR for my articles is generally between 20-50%. Let's be generous and say that 50% of readers click on the resource box link.
Now you are down to just 2-3 visitors per day. If you do a simple redirect to the affiliate salespage, it will take quite a while to get a sale (using a 1-2% sales conversion rate, although you may get a sale right away - I'm just going by averages).
If you don't redirect to the salespage and instead have a landing page, you further filter out the amount of people getting to the affiliate salespage (and therefore significantly reducing the amount of sales you will see).
For my bum marketing efforts, I try to target long tail keyword phrases that get at least 30 searches a day on Google (although I try my hardest to find daily searches of excess of 100 per day).
And here's the problem with too much competition:
The main goal with bum marketing is to get your articles listed as high as possible in the search engine results. The top of the first page of Google is ideal.
Now, if you are competing against 100 pages, getting on the first page of Google is simple. But if the long tail keyword phrase you have chosen as 1,246,863 competing pages, getting to that first page will be much more difficult (and virtually impossible for the newbie bum marketer).
Proper keyword research will greatly increase the probability of having a successful article. But this skill takes a little practice.
I see many bum marketers gets so excited about writing and submitting articles, that they skip proper keyword selection, or they at least don't do it effectively.
One article that has lots of searches and little competition will far outperform 20-30 articles written around long tail keywords that have very few daily searches or tons of competing websites.
Its because of this fact that I am actually spending less them writing articles, and more time finding outstanding keyword phrases (actually, I enjoy keyword research so it works well for me).
So if you are not seeing the results you would like from your bum marketing efforts, I would suggest analyzing your process for long tail keyword phrase selection.
Hope this helps some fellow Bum Marketers.
Best wishes,
JoeMack